Mitre Corporation Bedford Headquarters, Massachusetts

MITRE is a nonprofit systems engineering and information technology company, formed in 1958 to take over the SAGE project, developed by MIT's Lincoln Lab, located down the road. SAGE was the first nationwide automatic warning and defense system, a program which at the time constituted the largest military R&D outlay since the Manhattan Project. Though SAGE was obsolete by the time it was operational (it was built to detect aircraft, which were replaced by ballistic missiles), it provided the framework for a widespread communications and intelligence industry infrastructure, and MITRE has been in the middle of it all since the beginning. Today, MITRE's main function is to manage a number of federally funded research and development centers (FFRDC's), at the behest of various government agencies, including the IRS, the FAA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Some of these FFRDC's include the National Security Engineering Center, the National Cybersecurity FFRDC, the Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute, and the Judiciary Engineering and Modernization Center. MITRE has two main locations, one in Bedford, Massachusetts, the other in McLean, Virginia, in addition to many other locations worldwide. The name MITRE is an acronym for MIT Research and Engineering.